Smart communities
A three-year R&D partnership between Österåker municipality and BJØRK, created to build innovation capacity and develop new processes, services and solutions from local needs.
Period
1 Sep 2026 – 31 Aug 2029
Place
Österåker, Sweden
Format
Long-term R&D partnership
Approach
Quadruple helix and open knowledge sharing
Project focus
Municipal digitalisation and sustainable development involve many parallel initiatives, actors and systems. The programme therefore needs to strengthen what is already working inside the municipality while creating a shared process for identifying needs, prioritising R&I opportunities and moving from exploration to implementation.
Smart Österåker is a joint knowledge and method-development programme. It combines competence development, project identification, implementation support, external collaboration and funding work. The programme starts from the municipality’s and local community’s needs and is designed to build on existing digitalisation work rather than create a parallel track.
BJØRK in the project
BJØRK provides programme leadership, methodology, R&D expertise, structure, documentation, knowledge sharing and support in identifying external funding. The signed cooperation agreement also gives BJØRK a role in connecting Österåker with national and international partners and in translating research results into practice.
Partners & context
The programme is a formal R&D cooperation between Österåker municipality and BJØRK Innovation. Steering, programme and project groups are designed to include public-sector actors, academia, businesses and civil society.